Neoliberalism is often seen as a morally “evil”, profit-driven attack on good and successful social-liberal politics. Rarely, however, is the question raised as to how such a great demand for neoliberal reform proposals could have come about in the first place? “Soziopolis” is now a review of a monograph by Ariane Leendertz on ‘urban policy’ in the United States dedicated to this issue.
The monograph takes as its starting point the first “National Urban Policy” in the history of the United States, which was promulgated by the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter on March 27, 1978. The strategy was to bring together the many funding lines of numerous ministries under one roof and to focus on overriding objectives. Carter wanted to do more than apply simple answers to complex problems. His government, according to Leendertz in the Introduction to the monograph (p. 9 – definitely worth reading),
Rather, I start with the deeper causes of the problems that reinforce each other in urban areas: from unemployment and racial discrimination to urban sprawl and economic decline to financial hardship. Although the President admitted that previous policy programs had often been ineffective, he emphasized that the federal government must help improve the living conditions of people in the cities and halt decline: “The deterioration of urban life in the United States is one of the most complex and deeply rooted problems we face. The Federal government has the clear duty to lead the effort to reverse that deterioration.«
Carter’s program followed the American tradition of social-liberal politics rooted in progressivism. However, their implementation proved to be increasingly difficult in practice in the 1970s:
The frequently stated “complexity” of the problem situation seemed to elude targeted interventions more and more. What’s more, as the increasingly influential neoliberal wing around Ronald Reagan in the Republican Party argued, government attempts at a solution only made things worse. Reagan and his supporters had very different ideas about the role of the state and rejected any federal responsibility for social and economic crises in urban areas.
As is well known, Reagan wanted greatly reduce the influence of the federal government and free the economy and society from the regulating intervention state. Usually the story of this policy change is told with the classic narrative of the neoliberal turn. So …
as a history of the rise of the new conservative right, its militant critique of the welfare state, and the enforcement of neoliberal economic theory and ideology in the wake of Friedrich August Hayek and Milton Friedman in the United States Republican Party.
If you look closely, this is only one side of the coin. The second side is the exhaustion of problem-solving policies that have failed to deliver on their promises.
In the second half of the 1960s, a conception of political-administrative action began to erode, which we shall call “solutionism”. The core of the governmental philosophy of “solutionism” was the conviction that the state could – and should – be able to use the intellectual and material resources at its disposal to solve social problems and to control interventions in structural developments. This conviction, which became politically effective in the USA in the 1930s with the New Deal and reached its peak in the era of the Great Society, was increasingly called into question from the mid-1960s.
Obviously, social problems often elude direct state control. The results of government measures have repeatedly given rise to frustration. According to the review, the gap between concept and political and social practice was great. A lot contributed to this
also the sheer number of authorities and interest groups involved, the causalities (were) too vague and the problems aggravated by deindustrialization and depopulation too serious. Growing doubts about the possibility of overcoming social complexity through government action soon led to diagnoses of a crisis and a veritable “exhaustion of policy research”. Now the state-critical conclusion was obvious, the demands and expectations had to be withdrawn, the tasks and expenditure reduced.
This of course supports the political strategies from Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan. The Reagan administration thus legitimized the dismantling of the “urban policy”.
I also find it interesting the statement that although neoliberal measures were gaining in importance at the time, one cannot simply “classify every cooperation with the private sector as neoliberal per se”. The reviewer Moritz Föllmer calls it
a pleasantly sober assessment that should also apply to most Western European countries. In addition, neoliberal messages there, in a similar way as in the United States in the 1990s, intersected with “right” and “left” attitudes: the moral conservatism of Margaret Thatcher, the feminist discourse on autonomy and the urge of ethnic minorities to take their empowerment into their own hands take.
So we should look more closely at analyzing, at classifying and at the complexity of our narratives. The discussions about the type of “governability” of very complex, pluralistic democratic societies is certainly not over yet.